It is the inner meaning of Handel’s music, and its power of searching the profoundest recesses of the soul, that in the following pages I have endeavoured, so far as I am able, to elucidate. Its merely technical qualities have already been discussed enough and to spare. Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express. I have tried, how feebly and with what little success no one knows better than myself, to find the man Handel in his music, to trace his character, his view of life, his thoughts, feelings, and aspirations, as they are set forth in his works.
Books on Handel written by musicians already abound, but musicians as a rule take more interest in the means by which an end is attained than the end itself. They tell us a great deal about the methods by which a composer expresses himself, but very little about what he actually has to express.
